The meaning of "bolt" for "gibber" was new to me.  I have simply assumed that the verb "gibber" was a back-formation from "gibberish" and meant in this context that the history recounted had been rendered as gibberish.  Many innovative interpretations of history may at first seem like gibberish, as was Darwin's in his day and Marx's in his day.  Bill O'Reilly's interpretation seems to have hit a responsive cord with many people.  History seems to be so far from Bill's intellectual bailiwick, however, that it seems likely that the source of the gibbering was actually the suggestions and/or contributions of his co-author.  And thus, attributing a work to a different author may also turn its claims into gibberish.  



Bruce Despain



--- [log in to unmask] wrote:



From: "Spruiell, William C" <[log in to unmask]>

To: [log in to unmask]

Subject: Adjectival gibbered

Date:         Thu, 1 Dec 2011 04:03:19 +0000



Here's a potentially fun potential example of potential language change; I ran across it while reading comments to someone's blog post about controversy over Newt Gingrich's book on Lincoln (I'll read almost anything during a grading break):



"Ford’s Theatre has not banned the book and does not have the power to do so. It has removed the book from sale, which it has the power to do, and has the moral imperative to do if the book is as historically gibbered as described (I have not read the book and offer no opinion on its veracity)."



While I suspect some linguist, somewhere, has probably already written an article on this, it was new to me. It doesn't seem to match anything documented by the OED, and it doesn’t show up in COCA or COHA (although given the rarity of 'gibber', that doesn't necessarily mean anything). Googling it produces a lot of noise results; apparently, either spam textfarming sites have picked it up, or there are a lot of drug companies that employ jargon aphasics to write their product descriptions. A lot of what look like real examples, though, are computer-related in some way ("MS Outlook is gibbered"), and there are enough examples — and enough in which it's apparently used totally unselfconsciously — to make it interesting.



This is a perfectly reasonable direction for "gibber" to bolt, but since it's a low-frequency verb to start with, I'm wondering if it might become the main version heard/read by younger speakers. It wouldn't take many examples to outweigh the traditional use of the word. And the shift might render a gibbering idiot someone who's not completely gibbered yet, which is a rather appealing notion (I have, by the way, found two examples of 'gibbering' that could support this kind of analysis, e.g. "[A]nd there you have one fully functioning, fully gibbering, Internet troll…").



Bill Spruiell



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